My Thoughts on Changes

Sigh… News with a twist and editorial opinions. With that kind of linear thinking I guess is “one down and ‘n posts’ to go…” Nice. Guys, just in case you want to spare a few posts, here is a map with their locations. I was able to find it here and I’m just a regular guy with an Internet connection and Google… I’ve been reading Debka since its inception and I’m usually sympathetic and a supporter of the “right of existence” for Israel but give me a break. By the same token as expressed in that opinion, everybody and their unborn children is a spy in the region. Who knows, if you believe it, with enough conviction, it may be true in your minds. Chances are, reality is otherwise.
DEBKAfile –

DEBKAfile adds: The holier-than-thou tone of outrage taken by Annan is surprising when it generally known that many UN missions are exploited as the cover for foreign agents, often hostile, to carry out spying operations in war zones. The inadvertent Israeli air strike revealed the fact that the UN force in Lebanon includes Chinese observers. One was killed along with an Austrian, a Canadian and a Finn. The presence of Chinese observers keeping an eye on the combat in South Lebanon has never before been reported.
Our intelligence experts compare the incident to the inadvertent US bombardment which wrecked the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1998 (picture), killing a number of Chinese “diplomats.” It was discovered that from that building the Chinese had operated sophisticated surveillance to track the performance of American warplanes, missiles and smart bombs.
The Khaim observer post was located near Hizballah positions and training facilities in the eastern sector, where the IDF has launched the next stage of its campaign against Hizballah in southern Lebanon

Remember the photgraph of the girls drawing little Israeli flags on artillety shells? Below is a disclaimer in the form of “context”:
CJR Daily: About Those Photos of Little Girls and Artillery Shells …

They had just spent the last five days underground in a bomb shelter and this was the first time they had come up for some air. A new army unit had arrived in town, attracting a lot of media attention, and the children and their parents gathered around the missiles. It was the parents who wrote a few messages, then, as Goldman relates it, “the photographers gathered around. Twelve of them. Do you know how many that is? It’s a lot. And they were all simultaneously leaning in with their long camera lenses, clicking the shutter over and over. The parents handed the markers to the kids and they drew little Israeli flags on the shells. Photographers look for striking images, and what is more striking than pretty, innocent little girls contrasted with the ugliness of war? The camera shutters clicked away, and I guess those kids must have felt like stars, especially since the diversion came after they’d been alternately bored and terrified as they waited out the shelling in their bomb shelters.”

Which makes me think that, although I don’t doubt the real story of the pictures, it still doesn’t justify that children are used to fan hate across religious and ethnic lines. There is enough hate in the region to fuel Hell for millennia. Why show innocence side by side with hate? Or is it that there are really no innocents in the whole region and that all children born there are flying flags of a mindless dogmatic “Original Sin” and derervers of Hell on Earth? If there is no innocence left, where is hope?

…I feel much better…. Sigh… What a bunch of dictatorial crooks.
BBC NEWS | Americas | Bush ‘blocked phone tap inquiry’

Mr Bush had refused them security clearance, Mr Gonzales told senators.
A White House spokesman responded by saying the programme was reviewed regularly, including by Mr Gonzales.

I keep telling you, Debka reads like a fiction bestseller. Just the way the reports are written is quite engaging…
DEBKAfile – Bush Wants the Hizballah-Israel War to Give Iran a Bloody Nose

America’s Day of Independence 2006 was selected for this group to make its first low-key attacks against US forces in Baghdad and British units in Basra and break surface under the name of The Abu al Fadal al Abas Brigades. No one had heard of it because Tehran had kept this Iraqi arm of Hizballah dark as the ultimate weapon to spring on the Americans in Iraq at the appropriate moment.
President Bush saw that if he looked away and let Iran’s challenge burst into full-blown action without responding, America’s standing in Iraq and the rest of the region would be forfeit. He was further stirred into a response by Tehran’s developing appetite for quick gains. On July 12, believing they had got away with it in Iraq, Iran and Hizballah followed it up by opening a second front against Israel, America’s ally: the Shiite terrorists kidnapped two Israeli soldiers.
That was the last straw, but George W. Bush turned it around as a boomerang to hit Tehran. The Israeli Defense Forces, there to hand, were more than ready to punish Hizballah and had been raring to go after five years of forced restraint against the Lebanese group and Palestinian terrorists. For Bush, this course offered America the chance of a bold, efficient blow against a Shiite extremist terrorist group without a single American soldier having to step onto the battlefield.

If you want to know another “version” of the news in the Middle East, albeit heavily biased towards the Israeli side, read Debka At the very least is more interesting and novelesque…
DEBKAfile –

DEBKAfile adds: The Hermel drug-farming pocket bordered north and east by Syria is the haunt of smugglers who use the remote, strategically placed region to move fighters, weapons, cash and drugs across Syria into Iraq and as a staging post to other parts of the Middle East. The smuggling gangs’ overlord is Mughniyeh, a triple Hizballah-Iran-al Qaeda agent and terrorist executive, who has figured high on the US wanted terrorist list for more than two decades. On his orders, the smugglers recently relocated their main operation from the Syrian-Iraqi border to the Syrian-Lebanese border in preparation for the new warfront against Israel. In the last 48 hours, Iran has used this illicit route to beat the Israeli air, sea and land blockade and pump quantities of rockets, anti-air and anti-tank missiles and other advanced weapons systems to Hizballah for a fresh escalation.
Syria’s role in this smuggling operation is critical.

This goes to show that to find happiness in the “raw” you must almost leave the planet. Vanuatu is so far removed from everything that short of a destiny akin to the legend of Atlantis you have no choice but to be happy…
Commentary

Sometimes I wonder what are the Republicans (and some Democrats) smoking… Why try to heal a bullet hole? Isn’t better not to shoot the gun in the first place? Little evidence that there would be discriminatory pricing doesn’t mean it would not happen. Net Neutrality proponents, like Google and Yahoo, whom ARE in the Internet business (allow me stress the obvious to make a point) are “insiders” of the whole thing and know what’s coming if there are no safeguards established to prevent something like this. Besides, the fact there are people, in and out of the telecoms, whom think along the lines of “telecom companies invested the money to build the Internet infrastructure and should be free to charge what they see fit” (which is the biggest bullshit in the world as much of that money is subsidized by mine/your taxes, what you pay to talk to aunt Jenny across the country, and what you pay for accessing the fucking net in the first place…), is enough, in my book, to make sure the cookie jar is not raided empty by the greedy telecoms. Why throw sand into the gears of the Net by caving in to the greed of a few companies?

‘Net Neutrality’ Amendment Rejected

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) said such a law is unnecessary because there is little evidence of discriminatory pricing from Internet service providers. “We’re attempting to legislate on a problem that doesn’t exist and potentially make other problems in the process,” Ensign said. If telecom companies begin to charge higher fees, “I’d be the first to stand up and do something about it,” he said.